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To steal a line from Battlestar Galactica: All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again:

A group, in this case college age kids, discover an online sanctuary just to find out that everyone they have ever been in contact with including their parents are on it. First it was MySpace and everyone moved to Facebook, a safe haven for college age kids that required a .edu email address to join. This meant no parents, no relatives, no spam, no junk.

Then Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook decides that he needs to monetize Facebook and rake in the ca$h. He opens it up to everyone and there was only a tiny initial wave of users that committed Facebook-icide including myself (I only came back 2 years later because as a marketer I couldn’t miss out on this phenomenon). Then around this time last year, so November 2008, I started hearing stories that people’s parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles were now on Facebook and seeking them out – as if it wasn’t already awkward enough dodging Aunt Beth at the annual Thanksgiving dinner, but now people had to do it online? That’s where where many people are drawing the line.

Now Adweek throws out an article today about how Facebook is “getting” uncool for 18-24s (a.k.a. the college crowd) – to the surprise of many, but not people that have been following the pulse of this development.

Back to Battlestar Galactica: All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.

So, now the (1 Billion Dollar) question is: What is next great thing that the kids are going to migrate to?
Twitter? I see twitter more as a compliment to Facebook and not a direct competitor. Sure there are people that only use twitter or Facebook, but they are such different beasts that they don’t directly compete.
Leapfish? I doubt that they can fill the shoes of Facebook as Leapfish is an aggregator, but not a source like Facebook or Twitter.

The only thing that is for sure is that “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.”

Is Leapfish the next big thing? That has yet to be determined, but from my initial browsing it has a great chance of becoming my next internet portal along the lines of my yahoo or iGoogle. I love how it has embraced and integrated Social right from the beginning.